Free!! Museums:

Paris is great for museums AND has free admission for European students, so just remember to bring your DIS id. I forgot to bring mine so I just showed them my DIS admission letter email and it also worked. I've been to the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou before, so this time I wanted to see the Musée d'Orsay and l'Orangerie. I wish I had time to visit the Louvre again because you can never see it all, but I was excited to add some more museums to my list. Sidenote - the Centre Pompidou is a good place to see modern and contemporary art, architecture (engineered with the assistance of the Danish firm Ove Arup & Partners), and a view of the city of Paris.

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The Musée d'Orsay had a larger collection of works, and I thought the layout and design was more exciting and beautiful than the l'Orangerie. The museum is housed in the old Gare d'Orsay railway station, and is best known by the giant clock seen from the Seine that actually has the four written as "IIII"rather than "IV" if you look close enough. It has one of the largest collections of impressionist and post-impressionist art and mainly consists of French art. If I were going to go back, I would actually start at the highest level where you can view the city from inside the clock (see pic below) and have more time to see the more familiar impressionist and post-impressionist works on the 5th level. I also liked the separation of individual exhibition spaces that lined the left of the second floor. Giant arches framed the openings made an interesting space for exhibiting the collection. 

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The next day I visited the Musée de l'Orangerie, and I personally liked this museum better. This is the place with the famous panoramic paintings of Monet's Water Lillies. The first floor of the museum opens into the first elliptical shaped room of the Water Lillies. The second elliptical room forms the infinity symbol that Money envisioned for his work. Monet gifted these paintings to France after WWI to act as a sort of bouquet on Victory Day. The l'Orangerie was the perfect location to house these paintings because of its proximity to the Tuileries garden. Even though the   Water Lillies are so well-known today, they were actually ignored for years until the acquisition of the Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collection that led to a renovation of the building. The collection is on the floor below the Water Lillies and shows art in Paris from Impressionism to the 1930s by Derain, Cézanne, Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Renoir, and Soutine. I liked the separation of the long hallway exhibit space into individual artist sections in the Walter-Guillaume collection. The space was easy to follow and showed the development of art in Paris during the early part of the 20th Century. Another cool part of the lower level was the virtual reality video of the Water Lillies. I recommend getting a virtual reality ticket before viewing the exhibition on that level, because it did have a wait but was definitely worth it to try. I also enjoyed watching the video on the Water Lillies that explained the history behind these paintings. 

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